Polish president, victim of plane crash in Russia,
had close ties to the Jewish community.

04/12/2010 - 20:00

Rabbi Michael Schudrich

Special to The Jewish Week

Note: The Polish people suffered a loss when President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and 94 other passengers on a Russian jet, including many top Polish officials, were killed in a crash Saturday near Smolensk, Russia. Jewish leaders in Poland praised Kaczynski, 60, as a true friend of the Jewish community and Israel, and participants in the annual March of the Living wore black armbands this week in the president’s memory.

When an ethnic group or race endearingly becomes the nickname for a sports team, does that signal their arrival or shame? Native Americans have long decried the way sports fans have adopted tomahawk chops and tribal chants as ways to either root for or ridicule the Indians, Braves, and Redskins. On the other hand, the Irish don't seem at all bothered by Notre Dame's celebration of the poetry to their more pugnacious side.

Voters in Brooklyn's 44th Council District will go to the polls on Tuesday to fill the vacancy that was created when SImcha Felder was named deputy comptroller under John Liu. The winner will either by David Greenfield or Joseph Lazar, and in either case would be the third consecutive Orthodox Jew to represent the district, which includes all of Borough Park and much of Flatbush, and probably has more Jews, most of them Orthodox, than many U.S. cities.

Voters in Brooklyn's 44th Council District will go to the polls on Tuesday to fill the vacancy that was created when SImcha Felder was named deputy comptroller under John Liu. The winner will either by David Greenfield or Joseph Lazar, and in either case would be the third consecutive Orthodox Jew to represent the district, which includes all of Borough Park and much of Flatbush, and probably has more Jews, most of them Orthodox, than many U.S. cities.

Hila, Israel — Amid a flurry of reports about possible progress in prisoner-swap talks to secure the release of kidnapped Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit, his father Noam says he won’t get his hopes up despite signs of encouragement.

“It has only just started to move. It hasn’t reached an agreement. It has a much longer road to go,” he told The Jewish Week in an interview at the Shalit family home in this northern Israel hamlet.

Jerusalem — While British Prime Minister Tony Blair practically did cartwheels to avoid courting controversy during his visit to Israel this week, New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, also on a whirlwind tour, took no such precautions.

I keep getting emails and reading blogs about the infamous “Ellison letter” - the congressional letter to President Obama urging him to press Israel to lift the Gaza blockade (many of the writers put the word “blockade” in quotation marks, as if it bears no connection to reality).

David Marwell, director of New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, is among that small, but notable, group of historians and scholars whose career focus is on examining the Holocaust, making some sense of it, and conveying its lessons more than 60 years later.

But learned as Marwell is in the field, he avoided introducing his own children to the full horror of the Holocaust until he considered them old enough to absorb it.

1980 was a golden year for Jewish Republicans. That November Ronald Reagan won nearly 40 percent of the Jewish vote for the presidency, a modern record for the GOP and a mark that they have never come close to achieving since then.